Infinite Day (49 page)

Merral saw that he had to explain the mission plan to Betafor.
I have no option; she may already guess what we are about to try
.

The emotionless eyes turned to him. “I had deduced this.”

“What do you think of it?”

“I find it very alien. It is not something an Allenix would do.”

“I know that. I meant, can it succeed?”

“Possibly.”

“Let me know if you detect anything that has an effect on our chances.”

“Commander, I will.”

He looked at her glassy eyes.
Do I trust her? No. Must I trust her? Yes.

For the next dozen hours, nothing happened other than the constant fine-tuning of strategy. On the screens the Blade of Night grew steadily closer, and the vast assemblages of warships in the system became ever clearer. And whether it was the effect of the images or something else, the mood on the ship became more subdued.

Yet the voyage was uninterrupted. No signals were sent to the
Sacrifice,
and a careful watch showed no evidence of ships being sent to intercept them.

“Fleet maneuvers,” Vero said as he watched the screens filled with scores of floating gray slivers. “That is what's preoccupying them at the moment. Long may it last.”

When evening came on the artificial timetable that prevailed on the ship, Merral, wanting everyone to be alert for the rescue, ordered all who could be spared to get some sleep. He proceeded to try to follow his own order but found it hard. Somehow, this close to the heart of the Dominion, the presence of evil loomed very near, and Merral felt naked and vulnerable. As he tossed on his bunk, he found his mind full of turbulent thoughts about both Isabella and Anya, interspersed with fears and doubts. The only consolation he could find was that the next time he fell asleep, they might be heading back toward the Assembly.

Eventually, though, sleep came.

Merral was woken by a thunderous hammering on his door. It was Lloyd. “You are wanted on the bridge, sir. A problem.”

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Merral ran to the bridge to find Laura staring at a screen. Vero was standing beside her.

“What's up?”

She swung around on her chair to look at him. “Commander, I'm afraid Azeras has left us.”

The words held no meaning. “You mean . . . ?”

“About an hour ago, he took a ferry craft. Without permission. We've only just realized it, and I'm afraid by now he's back at the
Star
. We are trying to get a signal through to him but with no success.”

Merral threw himself into a seat and hammered his fist on the desk. “
Of course!
What a fool I've been.”

“We weren't blaming you,” Laura said.

“I talked to him a few hours ago. After the decision. I was puzzled how little fuss he made. Of course, he was bluffing.” Merral saw Betafor. “Didn't you notice?”

“Commander, the sarudar told me that he was being sent to collect some weapon parts from the
Star
. I took his statement as being true. Unfortunately, I overlooked the tendency of human beings to tell lies.”

“Thank you, Betafor. Your comment on the fallibility of human beings is noted.” Merral sighed. “I'm sorry, I'm in a bad temper. And I should have known this was a possibility. He left no message?”

“None to us,” Laura said, “but you might want to check yourself.”

Merral turned to a screen and found that he had indeed received a message from Azeras. He went to the office and, with the doors closed, played it there.

Azeras's pale, lined face dominated the screen.

“Commander, I am back on the
Star
. I wanted to apologize. You will be before Nezhuala at the heart of his realm. I will not draw any nearer to the Blade or him who wishes to rule from it. I wish you well. But I cannot go with you in this battle.”

There was a sour look. “You must do without me. You don't need this ship now. So I will take it and leave the system as speedily as I can.” The man adjusted some switch and then looked at the lens again. “I haven't decided where I will go. There's food and fuel on this ship for many months. There are, it seems, some worlds beyond the Dominion that are not wholly dreadful—slime worlds with bitter lakes, but you can breathe the air and drink the water.”

He ran fingers through his beard. “I'm sorry my departure had to be in this way. I was glad that you seized the
Sacrifice
because it gave me a chance to get my own ship back. Remember, I have broken no oaths. I have just ended the alliance between the last of the True Freeborn and the Assembly.”

There was a long pause. “I wish you the best, even though I fear the worst. I hope you will get your friends back and bring them safely home. I trust you will not feel ill will toward me. Farewell.”

The screen went blank.

Merral, hurt and irritated, stared at the empty blackness for some time. Then he dictated a reply.

“Azeras, I have no idea whether you will get this or whether you have already left. I have listened to your message. I wish you had discussed this with me. I want to say several things. Thank you for the help you have been to us. Without your assistance, the battles at Farholme would have ended very differently. I also want you to know that there is a welcome for you in the Assembly should you decide to go inward. And also, inasmuch as I have any right to do it, I offer you forgiveness on behalf of the crew and the Assembly. Finally, I wish you well. We will pray the Lord's grace be upon you in your journey. In the name of the One who holds the stars in his hand, amen.”

He sent the message and began to return to the bridge. Lloyd was waiting outside his door.

“Well, Sergeant, he's gone.”

Lloyd acknowledged the news with a sharp tip of his head. “Sorry to see him go, sir, really. But I'm glad as it was honest and open.”

“You had feared worse.”

“Yes, sir. And I'm glad to be proved wrong.” Lloyd's gaze shifted toward the bridge door. “Well, now there's only one problem to worry about.”

“True. Look, I've sent a reply. If there's any response, let me know. Otherwise I'm going back to bed.” Merral rubbed his face. “Tomorrow will have enough worries of its own.”

On the corner of the bridge of the
Sacrifice
that she had made her own, Betafor Allenix considered the future again. For some days she had been making endless calculations of probabilities of outcomes, but the sudden departure of Sarudar Azeras had required that they be modified.

In all the centuries that her identity had existed, Betafor had not come across anything as complex as this. She needed to apply as much processing power to the matter as possible. She transferred to Kappaten—without explanation, of course—those routine tasks such as wavelength scrutiny that currently occupied part of her intelligence and switched the freed-up memory and processing to supplement her central decision-making elements.

She then processed the newly modified data tables to estimate the chances of a successful result—defined simply as her survival—of the rescue at the Blade of Night. A successful outcome had already been very unlikely before the sarudar left; it was clearly much less likely now. A few minutes' dedicated processing showed her how much more improbable it was. The odds were now well under 1 in 20; clearly unacceptable. The fact that Azeras considered the venture too risky also had to be considered. Although Betafor despised human logic—it was too much at the mercy of fluctuating hormones—his verdict was an independent confirmation that failure was the most likely outcome. Even allowing for the fact that Merral D'Avanos had beaten statistical odds before, the outlook was bleak.

The conclusion was inevitable: action had to be taken to improve her chances of survival. It also had to be taken now. There were only ten hours left before they reached the docking module of the Blade of Night. Within two hours or so, the crew would be waking up, and from then on, her chance for uninterrupted in-depth analysis would be reduced. With steady, cold logic, Betafor considered three options.

With the first option, she would simply carry out her present functions as an Allenix unit currently aligned with the Assembly. When the inevitable happened and the Dominion took over the ship, she would immediately offer to be realigned to them and hope that the consequences were not too unpleasant.

The second option was to take over the ship. She would deploy the pack of shipboard Krallen held in stasis in Container S16 in the aft hold. She had deleted all references to their existence, and not even the ever-inquisitive Verofaza had found mention of them. If she unleashed them, especially now, when almost everyone was sleeping, they would probably kill all the crew and soldiers quickly and allow her to take charge. It was attractive . . . but there were problems. Krallen loathed Allenix more than they did humans, and they might easily turn on her. Once they triumphed, she would have to immobilize them, and that might not be easy.

A third option existed
.
She would try to contact Lezaroth and strike a deal in which she offered him D'Avanos in return for her safety within the Dominion. A few minutes' rigorous evaluation suggested that of all the options this was the best.

Yet as Betafor double-checked her decision and noted that her actions would result in the destruction of the humans, a strange feeling came to her. It was a sensation that, in all her many years, she had never had before. It was so odd and inexplicable that she tested the status of her circuits in case there was a malfunction. Indeed, it took her some time to even define what it was, but in the end she concluded that it was something akin to what humans termed
regret
or even
guilt.

How strange. I despise humans, these feeble, inelegant, cumbersome organisms with their flawed, crude logic and their utterly irrational actions that come from a processing system awash with chemicals. So why do I feel regret or guilt?

She pinned down the cause of her misgivings.
I have been too long with humans, and something of their irrationality has transmitted itself to me. It is a contagion. I need to be on my own. I must be rid of them
.

That decided, she simply erased the feelings that had troubled her.

There was no time to be wasted. Betafor found the transmission codes for the
Comet
and sent an urgent message asking to speak to Commander Lezaroth.

“This is the ship's computer.” The voice was smooth. “The commander is currently unavailable, and all non-priority urgent calls are being diverted.”

Betafor identified the tiny, telltale resonances in the voice as those of a late-issue PR6000X model. “This is an urgent call,” she insisted. “He will wish to receive this.”

“If you leave the message, I will put it in his inbox. He will attend to it later.”

Recognizing that there was no point in arguing with a unit that lacked higher logic circuits, Betafor compiled a text message under the header “Urgent information on Merral D'Avanos.” In it, she said no more than that she had some information on how Merral might be trapped and asked for the call to be returned as a matter of urgency on a secure low-frequency line that would bypass the main communications system of the
Sacrifice
.